I can use an antenna to watch local TV shows via their broadcast towers. I can save some of those programs to a hard disk or a dedicated external device for later viewing at home. Or, as would often be preferable, I can connect remotely to my home machine when I'm traveling in order watch live programming or pre-recorded shows from a distant hotel room. But when an innovative startup does some of that for me, the broadcasters roll out the legal brigade and try to sue the innovator into the ground.

The TV broadcasting wing of the copyright cartel has gone ballistic over Aereo, a service that could deny the broadcasters a small portion of their current revenue base. With bluster bordering on threats, the industry is signaling Congress that it should change the law if, as has happened so far, the courts continue to rule the new service legal. Otherwise, say the broadcasters, they may pull broadcast programming off the air and put it only on cable and satellite.

The broadcasters' fury nearly matches their greed and abiding sense of entitlement. They believe they have a fundamental right to enjoy the fruits of oligopoly: control of airwaves that are actually (or at least supposedly) owned by the public. The broadcasters leverage government-granted licenses – a collective gift worth uncounted billions of dollars – to extract vast sums from advertisers and non-broadcast distributors of their content, in a system that offers little or no accountability to the public.

And – this is key – they hate the internet except to the extent that they can control it for their own uses. They should, since broadband is making the broadcasting model more and more ridiculous. The current head of the broadcasters' lobby, former US Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, actually said out loud this week, in an interview with Variety, that the next Federal Communications Commission chair should be filled by someone who – really, he said this – pays less attention to extending broadband and more to broadcasting. Smith's reference to "our spectrum" was telling. Remember, it's not theirs; it's the public's.

Aereo's method is simple: It provides an antenna for each customer, capturing the signals from local broadcasters in New York City (with other cities to be added this year, the company says), and then makes the content available to the customers via Internet streaming. The price for this is not cheap – more than I'd be willing to pay, actually, at $12 a month – but it's clever.

What freaks out the cartel is this: The broadcasters have enjoyed a revenue stream in recent years from cable and satellite companies that retransmit local stations to their own customers, sending money back to the local stations, which in turn pay the networks for some programming. These retransmission payments have become a big deal to the broadcasters. They'd been absolutely reliant on advertising in the past, and while ads are still the dominant revenue source, this newer money stream is nontrivial at several billion dollars a year and growing.

This system is especially important to the big-network (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, etc.) affiliates and parent networks that have come to expect this revenue as something they're due as a matter of course. Aereo doesn't pay the networks or local stations, arguing that it's not retransmitting signals the way cable or satellite providers do.

The courts have sided with Aereo so far, most notably an appeals panel that denied an injunction, saying that the broadcaster essentially had no case. The latest ruling led News Corporation's Fox network president Chase Carey to warn darkly that the end of free broadcasts might be in sight. The New York Times' Brian Stelter reports that other broadcasters are making similar threats.

You can expect Congress to do the broadcasters' bidding, should it come to that. They wield enormous political power in Washington, in part because politicians are terrified of getting on the wrong side of the local broadcasters in their states and districts, where people get (sad to say) most of their "news" from local TV stations. And Congress has a habit of siding with the copyright cartel when it comes to punishing innovation that threatens old business models. Will Congress take the next step and outlaw home antennas?